Re: old synchronized scan patch

On Tue, 2006-12-05 at 10:49 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Florian G. Pflug" <fgp(at)phlo(dot)org> writes:
> > Hannu Krosing wrote:
> >> The worst that can happen, is a hash collision, in which case you lose
> >> the benefits of sync scans, but you wont degrade compared to non-sync
> >> scans
>
> > But it could cause "mysterious" performance regressions, no?
>
> There are other issues for the "no lock" approach that Jeff proposes.
> Suppose that we have three or four processes that are actually doing
> synchronized scans of the same table. They will have current block
> numbers that are similar but probably not identical. They will all be
> scribbling on the same hashtable location. So if another process comes
> along to join the "pack", it might get the highest active block number,
> or the lowest, or something in between. Even discounting the possibility
> that it gets random bits because it managed to read the value
> non-atomically, how well is that really going to work?
>

That's an empirical question. I expect it will work, since any active
scan will have a significant cache trail behind it.

> Another thing that we have to consider is that the actual block read
> requests will likely be distributed among the "pack leaders", rather
> than all being issued by one process. AFAIK this will destroy the
> kernel's ability to do read-ahead, because it will fail to recognize
> that sequential reads are being issued --- any single process is *not*
> reading sequentially, and I think that read-ahead scheduling is
> generally driven off single-process behavior rather than the emergent
> behavior of the whole system. (Feel free to contradict me if you've
> actually read any kernel code that does this.) It might still be better
> than unsynchronized reads, but it'd be leaving a lot on the table.
>

That's a very interesting point. I had assumed read-ahead was at the
kernel level without really caring what processes issued the requests,
but it may be system-dependent. I think that's what the elevator (or I/O
scheduler, or whatever it's called) is supposed to do. I'll see if I can
find some relevant source code in a Linux or FreeBSD box.

The controller certainly wouldn't care about process IDs, however.

Regards,
Jeff Davis